BYCHERINI: CELLO SONATAS, ETC

Anner Bylsma is a tremendous enthusiast, whose high spirits and nervous energy never fail to manifest themselves in his performances. Here he plays these five Boccherini sonatas with a quite extraordinary rhythmic vitality: listen for example to the finale of G8 or the opening movements of G10 (the chords at the beginning crunched out with tremendous verve) and G15. His articulation is as sharp and precise as can be imagined, and his rhythms, though by no means inflexible, are tough and firmly sprung. He throws off the high passagework with something close to reckless abandon, and it works pretty well: the only exception being the extremely rapid and alarmingly high-pitched figuration in the finale of G8, where the intonation is a little less than perfect in the exposition (though faultless, a fifth lower, in the recapitulation). In the slow movements he achieves a good deal of intensity, showing (notably in G8) a natural feeling for the way in which the expressive tension rises towards a cliche galant cadence and is released by its arrival; G2, a rather sombre C minor work, also has a fine slow movement which he plays with much intensity. There is expressive playing too in the Adagio of G10 and some eloquence in the Andantino that begins G9. But Bylsma does not, I think, always get the best out of the slow movements, which sometimes need a little more relaxation (not his strong point), warmth and grace than he brings to them; similarly, the movements, usually minuets, which Boccherini marks amoroso or affettuoso would have profited from more sense of loving care.

The actual sound of the music is rather different from what we are used to in this music, or any eighteenth-century cello repertory. Bylsma produces an incisive, rather wiry and resonant cello tone, supported here by fortepiano (in three of the five sonatas) and a second cello (in four of them); the combination of all three gives quite a rich sound, though not an indistinct one, for the fortepiano is light and clear—but with only the two cellos there is no sense of harmonies missing in the middle, because of the ring of the instruments. The two cellos alone play the group of fugues, which are slight pieces with at best slender claim to Boccherini's authorship.

-- Stanley Sadie, Gramophone [3/1994]